The Sober Realities of Manned Space Flight
By William Tucker

President Bush's announcement of a 280-million-mile manned space flight to Mars caught everyone by surprise. Space enthusiasts, arguing for years that NASA had lost its way, were electrified. "We've been stuck in low Earth orbit for decades," said Louis Friedman, executive director of the Planetary Society. "The goal should be exploration." NASA, still recovering from the recent Space Shuttle catastrophe, was eager to rededicate itself. A quick NASA calculation, however, revealed that the Mars effort would cost nearly $500 billion over 30 years. With funding tight and trouble brewing in the Middle East, Congress decided to ignore the project. After very little debate, the proposal dropped from sight.

 

That's what happened in 1989 when the elder President Bush proposed a manned flight to Mars by 2019. In 2004, President Bush the younger returned to his father's unfinished business and called for his own revival of space exploration, which would have astronauts getting back to the moon in 2020 and on to Mars thereafter. Only a year before, NASA director Sean O'Keefe was calling such an idea a "Hail Mary pass" and urging the public to be satisfied with slow, steady exploration by robotic probes. But the spirit of adventure seemed to be reasserting itself. As the President put it at a memorial service for the Columbia astronauts last year, "This cause of exploration and discovery is not an option we chose. It is a desire written in the human heart."

 

The $500 billion price tag has been scaled down considerably. Building on existing research, NASA will begin with $12 billion in spending over the next five years. Among most space veterans, however, these initial estimates are treated as a joke. "The Space Shuttle was originally supposed to break even and fly every two weeks," reminds Greg Klerkx, whose book Lost in Space is a critique of NASA. "It ended up costing $500 million per launch, and flying four or five times a year. When President Ronald Reagan first proposed the International Space Station, it was scheduled to be finished in eight years and cost $9 billion. Now it's over $70 billion and still isn't scheduled for completion until 2010."

 

This is the picture of a federal agency immune to the competitive influences of the private sector. "You see this little metal loop? It's called a carabineer," California space entrepreneur Rick Tumlinson told a Senate hearing right after the President's announcement in January. "You could go to any sporting goods shop and buy it for $20. Yet NASA pays over $1,000 for the same object because of its procurement methods. It's the 'not-invented-here' mentality and distrust of the private sector that makes the cost of these projects so astronomical."

 

So will the Mars expedition be different? "The obstacles in getting to Mars are going to be bureaucratic, not technological," says Howard McCurdy, a space program expert at American University. "The NASA that got to the moon in 1969 was a totally different animal from the NASA that got the job in 1961. The current NASA may have to undergo the same kind of transformation."

 

NASA has always been a mix of science and show business. "The moon expedition was basically an episode of the Cold War," says Dr. Eligar Sadeh, assistant professor at the Odegard School of Aerospace Sciences. "Planting the flag, putting footprints on the moon--that was done to prove we had a better system than the Soviet Union. Since then, NASA has never been able to refocus its mission."

 

Neil Armstrong's "One giant step for mankind" defined a generation. Yet few people remember that after 1972 the last three Apollo missions were canceled because the public was losing interest. There are only so many times you can hit a golf ball on the moon. "There's a need for heroics," says Supriya Chakrabarti, director of the Boston University Center for Space Physics. "It's hard for the public to get excited about astronomers looking at squiggly lines on their computer screens."

 

Once the moon had been reached, Mars seemed the next obvious destination. Instead, President Nixon scaled back the program. At the time, NASA was absorbing an unsustainably large 4 percent of the federal budget. The next step became the Space Shuttle--a workhorse that seemed eminently practical at the time but has turned out to be an expensive, clumsy albatross. With the exception of a few spectacular missions such as the repair of the Hubble Space Telescope, "the plain fact is that the shuttle has very little to do other than ferrying cargo to the International Space Station," sighs Louis Friedman of the Planetary Society.

 

"I vividly remember President Ronald Reagan going down to Texas after the Challenger disaster and memorializing the astronauts as heroes going further and faster into the unknown," says Friedman. "Of course they were doing no such thing. They were simply launching a communications satellite and carrying on the teacher-in-space show for schoolchildren--both rather mundane tasks. But by once again evoking the exploration theme, Reagan saved the space program."

 

Each Space Shuttle (there are now three) must be virtually reconstructed after each flight. The process takes two months and 20,000 people. Some of the parts are so outdated that engineers troll eBay for replacements. "What we save on re-use, we throw away on maintenance of the aging fleet," says Alex Roland, professor of military history at Duke and former historian of NASA. The Shuttles are scheduled to be retired for good in 2010.

 

The Shuttle's main task, launching communications satellites, could be performed just as well by expendable launch rockets. Fearing the program would have little business if this were allowed, Congress mandated that all government satellites be carried aloft by a Shuttle. "This very nearly ended the production of launch vehicles in this country," says Klerkx. "The powerful Saturn rocket, which carried Apollo to the moon, was abandoned after 1970."

 

When the Challenger disaster canceled Shuttle flights for the next three years, our burgeoning communications industry was left high and dry. It turned instead to the European Space Agency and its Ariane rocket, which picked up the slack. It was many years before big U.S. contractors such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin regained market share. "It was a classic case of a trade protection that backfired," says Klerkx.

 

In their plodding way, the Russians have become the most reliable technicians for putting satellites into space. They have stuck with Soyuz, the dependable old missile-based platform that hasn't been modified much since the time of Yuri Gagarin. The Russians have become experts in permanent laboratories. Our Skylab lasted from 1973 to 1979. The Russians launched their Salyut experimental station in 1971, then followed with Mir in January 1986. Mir stayed aloft for 15 years, with one Russian cosmonaut clocking 748 days in space, more than all the Shuttle trips put together. When Mir began losing altitude in 2000, two American entrepreneurs paid the Russians $5 million for permission to try to salvage it. The space merchants funded one rescue mission but were unable to lift enough fuel to keep Mir in orbit. It rained down over the Fiji Islands in March 2001. "NASA did everything it could to frustrate the Americans' effort," says Klerkx. "It doesn't like private competitors in its domain."

 

Today's International Space Station (ISS) was originally proposed as "Space Station Freedom" in 1984 by the Reagan administration. The orbiting outpost was conceived as an extraterrestrial mini-city along the lines suggested by Wernher von Braun--in a series of Collier's articles in the 1950s--and MIT visionary Gerard O'Neill in his 1977 book, The High Frontier, which suggested 20 million people could live in space. By 1992, however, after spending $11 billion, Space Station Freedom was still on the drawing board. Sensing a quagmire, the Clinton administration brought the Russians in on the project, both to tap their experience and to prevent newly unemployed Russian military scientists from peddling their expertise to rogue nations.

 

Although scaled down considerably, the freshly christened International Space Station was to include platforms for launching flights to the moon and Mars, and for housing dozens of astronauts carrying on experiments in drug manufacturing, protein crystallization, and molding perfect ball bearings. All this would help the ISS pay for itself, and in June 1993, the House authorized another $13 billion by one vote. But since the first stage was lifted into orbit by the Russians in 1995, costs have soared while ambitions faded. Assembly platforms for launching moon rockets have vanished. When completed, the ISS will hold six astronauts. The two in residence now spend 85 percent of their time on construction and maintenance. In essence, the U.S. is spending billions so that two astronauts can build a space shed.

 

The only experiments the astronauts are performing are on themselves, measuring the long-term effects of life in zero gravity. The news has not been good. Muscles atrophy quickly and--for reasons yet unknown--the human body does not manufacture bone tissue in space. Russian cosmonauts return from the ISS virtually helpless for the first few days. This doesn't bode well for sending astronauts on an 18-month journey to Mars. Artificial gravity could alleviate the problem, but it can't be tested on the Space Station since it requires a large revolving body like the Jupiter probe in Arthur Clark's 2001.

 

Meanwhile, the ISS has sucked up funds from nearly every other NASA project. Russia has been unable to pay its share, so the U.S. quietly picks up the tab. "It's hard to pin down because of NASA's accounting, but it looks like we've spent about $80 billion thus far," says Dr. Sadeh, author of 2003's Space Politics and Policy. "By the time it's finished it will probably cost $150 billion." Yet the Bush plan calls for continued expansion, adding European and Japanese modules over the next few years. "Right now the argument for completing the ISS is that we have to fulfill our international obligations," adds Klerkx. "Otherwise it would probably be put in mothballs."

 

Ironically, while NASA's manned efforts have been of dubious value, its unmanned probes have been hugely successful. Many scientists are calling the last 30 years a "golden age of astronomy" thanks to their discoveries. The Viking, which mapped Mars in the 1970s; the Voyager trips to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune in the late 1970s and early 1980s; the Galileo probe of the 1990s, which explored Jupiter's moons and discovered an apparent salty ocean beneath the icy crust of Europa; the Cassini-Huygens mission which this year reached Saturn and its moon Titan; the Spirit and Opportunity rovers investigating Mars at this moment--all have expanded our knowledge to a spectacular degree.

 

To be sure, there have been embarrassments. The Mars Polar Lander failed in 1999 because someone forgot to convert English measurements to metric. Genesis, which probed the sun's environment, recently crashed in the Utah desert when its parachute failed to open. And of course the Hubble Telescope turned out to be myopic--a manufacturing error 1/50th the width of a human hair left the original telescope out of focus.

 

But that was mostly repaired when Shuttle astronauts fitted it with a "contact lens," and NASA's "eye in the sky" has since returned a decade's worth of breathtaking images and fresh knowledge. Hubble has mapped the heavens, observed gravitational lenses that confirm Einstein's theory of general relativity, discovered galaxies that go back almost to the beginning of time, and made a convincing case for the "Dark Energy" that appears to be driving the expansion of the universe.

 

Yet a week after Bush's Mars proposal, O'Keefe announced that NASA would abandon Hubble. New safety precautions require that the Shuttle be able to dock at the International Space Station in case of any emergency. Since the telescope orbits far from the ISS, any mission bound for Hubble for one of its regularly required maintenance visits would be unable to reach the Space Station if it ran into trouble.

 

"Hubble's last gyroscopes are due to fail within the next three to four years," says Dr. Sadeh. "After that it can't be positioned for observations." Pressure from the scientific community and Congress has forced O'Keefe to explore robotic repair, but many remain skeptical. "I wouldn't be surprised if a couple of astronauts volunteer to risk one last mission," says Dr. Sadeh.

 

So NASA's manned programs had just about come to the end of the line when President Bush announced his plan to visit Mars. The message sent a jolt of electricity through the ranks of space enthusiasts, who have been pushing for the new goal for more than a decade. "This was long overdue," says Friedman.

 

But the Mars mission raises an immediate question--will a reinvigorated NASA finally open space exploration to competition and the private sector? Or will it simply use the Mars mandate to pile cost upon cost in the same old way? "When Sir Edmund Hillary first climbed Mount Everest, he had so many porters he needed ten more just to carry the money to pay the others," says McCurdy, who analyzes the space program in his book Faster, Cheaper, Better. "Now two people can climb Mount Everest by themselves. We need the same approach to Mars. You've got to pare down. Closing down the Space Station and the Shuttle would be a start."

 

Dozens of companies have been hot for chances to launch passengers and cargo into space. Visionaries have suggested that cash prizes could encourage the necessary innovation and competition. Tumlinson has proposed that NASA offer a prize of $50 million to any private company that can map the south pole of Mars, where a landing is likely to take place. "People don't remember that when Charles Lindberg crossed the Atlantic, he was competing for the $25,000 Orteig prize," he says.

 

In 1995 Greg Maryniak, a St. Louis trial lawyer, founded the Ansari X-Prize, offering $10 million to the first group to launch a passenger-carrying spaceship 100 kilometers above the Earth, return it to the ground, and launch it again within two weeks. On October 4, the Mojave Aerospace Ventures Team claimed the prize when pilot Brian Binnie took SpaceShipOne 368,000 feet above the Earth for the second time in a week. Almost simultaneously, British entrepreneur Richard Branson announced he would soon be carrying space tourists above the atmosphere for $200,000 a seat.

 

"The mission of NASA should be the same as the mission of the old National Advisory Commission for Aeronautics in the 1920s," says Klerkx. "NACA continued to do research but turned the building and flying of airplanes over to the private sector."

 

In 1990, an obscure engineer at Martin Marietta named Robert Zubrin caused a sensation by proposing Mars Direct, a way of getting to the Red Planet without stopping at either the ISS or the moon. Zubrin's plan would send a robotic Earth Return Vehicle two years ahead of time to mine the planet for the methane needed for the return trip.

 

"We're much better prepared to get to Mars now than we were to get to the moon in 1961," says Zubrin, who has since founded the Mars Society and written The Case for Mars (1996). "The whole mission could be accomplished in a decade, rather than 20 years, as NASA is proposing." Yet NASA's not-invented-here policy makes such outside suggestions unlikely.

 

One of the keys to NASA's plan is the development of a new system for generating electricity from nuclear radiation. In 2002, O'Keefe launched the Prometheus Project, a $1 billion effort to develop an improved nuclear propulsion system. Conventional reactors use radioactive heat to drive steam turbines, but such boilers are too heavy for space.

 

Another problem: Astronauts making the 560-million-mile round trip will be exposed to huge doses of cosmic radiation. The only protection is a shield made of the heaviest elements--which would weigh down the ship. All this raises an obvious question: Why send people to Mars at all? Couldn't we just rely on improved robotics? "The risk to human life is obviously great," says Friedman. "But the payoff for sending astronauts is huge. A human being exploring the geology of Mars could do in one day what a robot can do in a month."

 

This leads to an even bigger question: Why go in the first place? Other than planting the flag and establishing our hegemony over the solar system, where is the lasting purpose in such an effort? Viewers from Manila to Moscow would be glued to their TV screens, and nations of the world might feel united (except for Islamic radicals, who would be scheming on how to blow the thing up). But the Olympics serve much the same purpose.

 

The justifications for human space exploration are generally stated as these: adventure and the stimulation of pushing into the unknown; making new worlds habitable for future generations; scientific discovery and unraveling the mystery of who we are.

 

These are no small things. European cultures were vastly invigorated during the Renaissance by the discovery of the New World. Columbus, Vasco de Gama, and Magellan became heroes who defined the West for centuries. Cultures that pioneer seem to thrive, while those that stop pioneering often fester and degenerate. "Human beings either look out or they look down," says Friedman.

 

Space enthusiasts have always been big fans of Frederick Jackson Turner's "Frontier Thesis," which says that the American character was formed by the constant exploration of new horizons. "Lots of people stayed home in Europe during the settling of the New World," says McCurdy. "Maybe there's been some selection in our genes."

 

Whether it is our destiny to colonize the solar system, however, is an entirely different matter. The moon is not a virgin continent waiting to be inhabited, but a barren oxygen-less desert that will have to be claimed inch by inch. At best, it will require the construction of huge, closed-in Earth-like environments that would have to be provisioned continuously. Space enthusiasts often suggest other planets could be "terraformed" --transformed into an Earth-like environment--in case humans have to escape if the Earth should be destroyed by an asteroid. This may make good science fiction but can hardly serve as a goal for NASA policy.

 

Finally, there is the matter of scientific investigation. The great question that hovers over all space exploration is the oldest philosophical quest: How did we get here? Are we alone? Are other planets inhabited? Is life a miraculous one-time occurrence or a normal process in the evolution of the universe? These great questions have puzzled humanity since Empedocles asked, "Why is there something instead of nothing?"

 

As Isaac Newton once said in describing his own scientific motivations, we are sitting on the seashore amused by a few pebbles while whole vast oceans of the unknown lie before us. No one would suggest we should not pursue these mysteries. The question is whether we have to squander vast amounts of money to do it.

 

Space travel will come eventually. It was more than a century before Columbus's discoveries led to any attempts to colonize the New World. Our timetable may not be all that different. Yet we should also be chastened by the example of sixteenth-century Spain, which bankrupted itself in pursuing the Age of Discovery.

 

Now as then, "privateering" may be a solution. It is certainly better than shoveling money at an entrenched bureaucracy.

 

Veteran New York City reporter William Tucker, a college physics major, has written books on environmentalism, crime, and housing.

 

 

An Enthusiastic View of Spacefaring

By Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox

 

On Thursday, May 25, 1961, President John F. Kennedy awoke to a glorious spring day. It was the perfect setting for a new beginning. And a new beginning was exactly what Jack Kennedy wanted. In this fifth month of his new administration, he had just endured the Bay of Pigs calamity. And a headline in the Washington Post that morning noted Lyndon Johnson's return from his first overseas trip as Vice President--to Southeast Asia, where trouble was brewing.

 

Another military adventure was the last thing Kennedy wanted now. For one thing, he didn't want to spend any more money than he had to. In 1961, the federal government was planning to dole out almost $95 billion, a huge sum. Kennedy's economic advisers were warning him that the budget deficit might exceed $3 billion.

 

Another of the Post's front-page stories that morning outlined a speech the President was about to make. "President Kennedy will address a joint session of Congress at 12:30 today on 'urgent national needs' in what will amount to a second State of the Union message," read the Post's lead. The story speculated about what the President might say and then turned to his motives: "Ever since the Cuban invasion fiasco the bloom has been off the bright rose of the early days of the new administration," and today's speech, the Post explained, was part of an effort to recover the Žlan of the early spring. That Kennedy was going to Capitol Hill to deliver the speech personally--a step usually reserved for only the most momentous of occasions--indicated how seriously the new administration viewed the address.

 

Eight hundred miles south of Washington, at Cape Canaveral, Florida, the day was typically warm and humid. Rocco Petrone, a 35-year-old Army major planning the launch facilities for America's massive new Saturn rockets, was on his way to lunch. He turned on the car radio: President Kennedy was scheduled to address Congress, and rumor had it he would say something about the space program.

 

It was a long speech, and near the end the President said this:

 

"I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth. No single space project in this period will be more exciting, or more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish."

Petrone's face broke into a grin. A man of theatrical flair, he loved the drama of a nation undertaking this enormous challenge in full public view, saying to the world, "Here's the line we're going to cross."

In a nearby hangar where members of America's manned space program were preparing a Mercury capsule for one of the nation's earliest manned space flights, some of the engineers were told of Kennedy's plan for a moon flight. Scott Simpkinson, who was in no mood for humor after months of 16-hour days wrestling with the capricious Mercuries, growled something like, "Shut up, I ain't got time to be joking with you," and continued with his work. Simpkinson hadn't heard anything about this moon business. And Kennedy wanted them to do it by the end of the decade? He didn't take it seriously.

Sitting at a nearby desk, engineer Sam Beddingfield took the announcement seriously, but didn't get excited. He thought of himself and his fellow engineers at the Cape as ditch diggers: They would be glad to dig any ditch anybody wanted when someone told them how wide, how deep, in which direction, and by when. Beddingfield figured that Kennedy had given them a good by-when. He didn't know whether they could actually get to the moon before 1970, but it was useful to have a fixed schedule to work to. It helped organize things.

Dick Koos, a youngster of 24, was trying to get a flight trainer to work. The device simulated flight in a Mercury capsule for the astronauts to practice on, but it was a balky creature, full of bugs and glitches, and always broke down while the astronaut was still putatively over Madagascar or some such place. When he heard the news, all Koos could think of were the television newsreels of rocket launches he used to watch in the enlisted men's day room back at Fort Bliss. Every time, it seemed, the rockets would dance around on the pad and then blow up. He was still getting used to the idea of putting a man on top of one of those things--and now came Kennedy's charge. It was more confusing than exciting. Here they were trying to get a simulator to run for three hours at a time, and Kennedy was saying, "Go to the moon"? Somebody, Koos thought, must know something he didn't.

A man who knew a lot that Dick Koos didn't, Robert Gilruth--the chief operational officer of the American manned space program--was flying over the farms of the Mississippi Valley when the speech began. He had asked the pilot to set up a radio patch so he could listen. An accelerated program, yes, Gilruth had wanted that. A lunar landing, yes, in an orderly fashion, with time to work through all the difficulties that such an enterprise was bound to encounter. But not this. As the words sank in, as he realized that the President of the United States was asking an enthusiastic Congress to commit the nation's honor to getting a man to the moon and back before the end of the decade, Robert Gilruth, the man who was supposed to make good on it, was aghast.

Yet eight years and eight weeks later, Neil Armstrong stepped off the ladder of the lunar module Eagle onto the Sea of Tranquility. It was an epic achievement.

The audacity of America's trip to the moon in the 1960s becomes more and more striking as contemporary technology moves away from the technology that deposited men on the lunar landscape. Computers, for example: The computing capacity of the mainframes in the Apollo Control Center was just a fraction of what's available in a consumer desktop model today. The entire Saturn V stack--all three stages of the rocket booster plus the command module and the lunar module on top--had less computing capacity combined than today's typical cell phone.

When director Ron Howard filmed Apollo 13, he was meticulously accurate in almost everything, but the scenes in Mission Control showed charts and graphs on the flight control consoles. Jerry Bostick, a flight operations veteran who was acting as a technical adviser, explained to Howard that he should show the flight controllers looking at black screens filled with columns of white numbers. Howard replied that there are some things an audience just won't accept, and computer displays as incomprehensible as Bostick described are one of those things.

The truth is, we went to the moon with technology that makes the enterprise look like a romantic, impetuous gamble. It wasn't a foolish gamble. The Saturn V may not have had any nifty microprocessors on board--the microprocessor wasn't invented until two years after the first lunar landing--but it worked every time, and its power dwarfed that of any launch vehicle made since. The engineering of the command module and lunar module was so ingenious that it brought the crew of Apollo 13 home despite a catastrophic explosion. The flight operations system, invented from scratch for this program, proved itself a model of how to make life-and-death decisions in seconds. The proof of the technical excellence of Apollo is its record.

But Apollo was indeed romantic and indeed a gamble. The story line already sounds like a tale from long ago and far away, when people in the public eye took enormous risks and held nothing back. Often things went wrong, sometimes disastrously so. Yet those involved did not falter, did not make excuses; they proceeded onward, taking new risks. The people of Apollo lived with pressure, esprit, tension, and exhilaration that set the decade's work apart from everything else in their lives.

These men and women covered ground in giant strides. Contemplate again the bare bones of their timeline: In November 1958, the United States formed the Space Task Group, consisting of 45 people. In July of 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon--an elapsed period of ten years and nine months. Think back to what you were doing ten years and nine months ago, and realize how short a time that is. Now try to imagine a nation beginning a space program on that day with 45 people, no launch vehicle, no spacecraft, no launch facilities, no experience with manned space flight--and landing on the moon this morning. What the people of Apollo accomplished is already hard to believe. In a few decades, it will be almost beyond imagining.

Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox are authors of Apollo, a history of the lunar program, just re-issued in paperback.

 

 

A Skeptical View of Spacefaring

By Gregg Easterbrook

 

America's manned space program is sure to continue, because Congress will insist on it. There might even be some future turn of events that could make astronauts essential to society--if a large asteroid were approaching Earth, we'd sure want people who could fly to it and plant bombs. So the pragmatic question is how to rationalize manned space flight. The answer is to cancel the Space Shuttle program and replace it with something cheaper and safer.

 

It's distressing that Shuttles blowing up twice on national TV still haven't caused Congress to do the obvious--end the program. Failing schools shouldn't be rewarded with more money; why should failing space programs? So far as I can tell, to Congress, the mission of the Space Shuttle is to deliver money to constituents. Who really cares if it blows up or accomplishes anything commensurate with cost? All we care about is getting the money in our district.

 

Suppose Shuttle operations were canceled and ten years of spending set aside to develop new launch systems. That would create a pool of around $35 billion, plenty for a major development project. Almost every analyst who thinks rationally about what should come next arrives at the same conclusion: What's needed is a new generation of low-cost throwaway rockets for putting payload into orbit, coupled to a small "spaceplane" carrying people only on those occasions when human beings are essential in space.

 

Considering that the U.S. has not designed an all-new throwaway rocket since 1967, new technology in materials and electronics ought to allow us to produce a better vehicle at relatively low cost. A true free-market fly-off for best new rocket might produce big savings. Then the workaday job of lifting satellites into orbit could be handled efficiently.

 

Get the payloads off the Shuttle and onto unmanned throwaway rockets, and astronauts will stop dying to perform humdrum tasks. The crew of Challenger died trying to deliver to orbit a data-relay satellite; the crew of Columbia perished after conducting some minor experiments that an automated probe could have handled at one tenth the price. When NASA can once again put payloads into orbit at low cost and at no risk to people, our other space plans can become more ambitious.

 

Spaceplane buffs have been agonizing that half a century ago the U.S. had a functioning, low-cost spaceplane: the X-15. Beginning in 1959, the X-15 flew to an altitude of about 60 miles, the boundary of space, some 200 times. Dropped from beneath the wing of a B-52, this spaceplane proved reliable and cheap. When initial Space Shuttle funding decisions were made in the early 1970s, NASA lobbied furiously against various proposals for a grown-up X-15--exactly because they knew such a vehicle would be dramatically cheaper than the Shuttle.

 

If we could build a good manned spaceplane in 1959, I'm guessing we could build a better one now. That the private entrepreneur Burt Rutan was able to build a modern version of the X-15, his SpaceShipOne, entirely without government assistance, indicates the practicality of small spaceplanes. Rutan's spaceship is not powerful enough to reach orbit, and lacks essential safety systems--NASA would need something better--but Rutan built a working, flying spaceship for about $25 million--the sort of money NASA spends on a useless feasibility study. NASA has spent at least $3 billion merely to study what failed on Columbia. Imagine if, instead, that money had been given to Rutan or some other cost-conscious entrepreneur for work on a realistic Shuttle alternative.

 

NASA endlessly investigates low-cost Shuttle alternatives, finds a way to make them expensive, and then abandons the project. Its latest look at a five-person spaceplane launched atop a regular rocket and designed for people only was carefully couched strictly as a means to get people back from the Space Station in the event of an emergency. Don't panic Congressional porkers, it would certainly not be a Shuttle replacement, NASA assured! That's exactly what we should be seeking, though.

 

One reason why the Space Shuttle program lingers against common sense is because it has no objective. The Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs all aimed for well-defined milestones, and as each reached its objective, the program concluded. Nobody could have argued for endless funding for Gemini flights because the Gemini program was supposed to accomplish two specific tasks: the first American spacewalk, and the first orbital rendezvous. It accomplished them, then sent its spare capsules to the Smithsonian and entered the history books.

 

Because the Shuttle program has never had a defined objective, it cannot achieve its goal--and therefore cannot end! Without a defined objective, there is nothing against which to judge results.

 

The Shuttle lobby and the Congressional delegations from states with NASA flight centers or assembly facilities fear that if the Shuttle were canceled, the replacement might be some dramatically retrenched mini-program. And they might be right--because our current manned space program, as they know in their hearts, has hardly any value. A true rationalist might advocate shutting down almost everything in our manned space program until there is a propulsion breakthrough.

 

NASA would like to offer some compelling vision, but when the agency debates this internally, as it often does, even the space cadets can't identify clear benefits. The two possible bold plans at the moment are returning to the moon to establish a research base, and sending humans to Mars. It is very, very hard to justify either, even without considering the financial costs and risk to life.

 

A research base on the moon? Surely moon researchers would discover many things about the origins of the solar system that would be of interest to geologists. Maybe they'd make some stunning finding like the wreckage of an alien space probe. But would anyone like to bet?

 

Given that today's nobody-knows-what-it's-for Space Station has already cost up to $80 billion, a manned base on the moon, farther away and requiring extra descent and ascent energy, might cost at least three times as much. Odds are the yield in human knowledge would be small compared to, say, spending the same amount on medical research. And please don't tell me we would mine the moon's resources. Almost all primary commodities are already in oversupply on Earth, while no one mines Antarctica, though that's possible at a minute fraction of the cost of moon mining.

 

A trip to Mars? Many advocates rhapsodize about this. But with current rocket motors, a Mars round trip would take about two years. Several automated missions delivering supplies, fuel, and equipment would have to arrive at Mars successfully before departure of the ship bearing humans. That crew vessel would need to be elaborately shielded against cosmic and solar radiation--not a threat to the Apollo astronauts, who were always within Earth's protective magnetic sphere--and there is no shielding solution that does not entail substantial weight. You'd need a full operating theater aboard the ship and at least two surgeons on the crew to treat health problems. Probably there would need to be two complete Mars vessels flying in tandem, in case one develops a fault during the transit. And you'd have to be confident that six to ten people could live extremely close together--essentially, aboard a submarine--for two years without psychological conflict. Remember how well this plan worked out for the much more spacious Biosphere II.

 

Mars advocates talk about fast trajectories in cheap inflatable spacecraft and going to the Red Planet without fuel, then using a tiny nuclear reactor to manufacture propellant for the return trip. Even if such dreams were technically possible, plans built on fuel-less inflatable craft provide no margin for error. NASA should do this mission right or not at all. Doing it right would mean spending $100 billion to $200 billion, and that's assuming we first develop a Shuttle replacement that can put all the mass--thousands of tons--into orbit affordably.

 

Would men and women on Mars make interesting discoveries? That seems almost certain. There's a fighting chance of finding fossil remains of at least some form of microbial life. There could be much, much more. But $200 billion and tremendous risk to life doesn't seem like much of a vision when automated Martian probes could do most of what astronauts could accomplish for a small percentage of the cost. NASA already has several advanced, automated Mars landers. Unless they find something really spectacular, these probes are likely to reduce the short-term argument for sending people to the fourth planet.

 

When I try to come up with a compelling new vision for NASA, the only one that really registers is a systematic search for asteroids and comets that might hit Earth--"near-Earth objects," as astronomers call them--coupled with construction of some kind of spacecraft, perhaps manned, designed to intercept a killer rock and blow it up or knock it off course. Yes, this sounds like a movie, but protecting the planet from the unlikely, though absolutely real, threat of a horrifying impact is the only present way NASA and its astronauts can perform a service of clear value to taxpayers. Killer rocks and comets have hit Earth many times in the past and will hit again. Logic points to this as NASA's prime current mission. But asteroid defense is not a glamorous task, and would be relentlessly lampooned.

 

Everything I've said, of course, changes if there is a propulsion breakthrough that could lift tons into orbit cheaply, or zip vessels through space at high speeds. So let's go for propulsion research, including more work on nuclear propulsion. But this has no application to NASA policy decisions of the moment.

 

Gregg Easterbrook is a senior editor at The New Republic. This is adapted from an essay published in Slate on February 6, 2003.

 

A Lyrical Vision

 

Genesis is a 300-page epic poem composed by TAE contributing writer Frederick Turner which envisions futuristic human activity on Mars after it has been given a breathable atmosphere, precipitation, and lush plant growth via human climatic engineering. Due to reduced gravity, human beings would be able to fly under their own power on Mars. The following passage imagines a flying lesson:

 

Wolf stands upon a windy hill, his goggles

Pushed up on his head, his gray eyes distant,

A sky-dauphin, like Saint-Exupery:

Let's listen to him lecture to his students:

 

Your muscles were evolved to bear your body

Against the leaden gravity of Earth.

By now the exercises you have done

Have given you that strength again. On Earth

You could all jump a meter in the air.

Here some of you can leap to twice your height.

Now watch Irene. She weighs forty pounds.

See: She can long-jump over 13 meters

And her hang-time's what? Two point eight? Thank you.

That's enough time, you'll see, to take two strokes,

And get a glide you find you can sustain.

You can all press an easy eighty pounds,

Enough to beat the drop rate and the drag.

Then you can get your feet into the stirrups

And make your flying height. A hundred meters

Keeps you out of trouble, and you still

Have depth perception while you feel you need it.

Landing is tough, I know. For those of you

Who really can't, we've got the brained wings

Which do it for you....

 

Wind sifting by, divided by your blade;

Wingtips trailing a curl of turbulence;

Your fingers rule the carpus, metacarpus;

Your masked face feels a burr of parching speed;

A long glide down the aeroclinal wedge

Into the sudden buoyancy and fetor

That rises from the sweetness of a meadow;

The swift-approaching wavetop of a ridge;

The gasp and fall away into the chasm

That succeeds, the flicking turn along

The cliffwall till the updraft catches you;

The spiral up into the towering sky

As fields and trees diminish like a lens;

The silence as you leave the world of bells,

Cries, stamp and snort of animals, the rush

And burble of the streams, the sigh of trees;

The sunny blisses of the middle air,

The dizziness of summer afternoons,

The suck and dumbness of the ear's drawn drum....

 

How do we get down? We should have a kite-string,

We should have a fishing-line, a reel,

A spool to reel us in, a puppeteer,

A yoke, an apron-string, and we have none!

Ah joy and terror, now we truly know

The meaning and the function of a roof:

It is a lid to keep the sweetness in!